Page 175 - Sport Culture and the Media

156 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

to the misgivings of female athletes about posing naked, informing the reader
that ‘Swimmer Samantha Riley took her mother and boyfriend, Norwegian
skater Johan Koss, along for support’ and quoting the photographer that ‘Sam
was nervous . . . I’d do a polaroid and she’d have a look at it and then show her
mum and decide if it was OK or not’ (p. 20). Even the small inset photographs
showing the athletes ‘at work’ portrayed all the men in active poses but several
static shots of women. Thus, as was noted above, media sports texts can be seen
to be ‘bearers’ of social ideologies (in this case of gender) that project meanings
that simultaneously draw on already dominant ways of seeing the world (such
as men ‘do’ and women ‘are’) and contribute substantially to the maintenance
of those perspectives (it always was and has to be that way), which, in turn,
powerfully condition the ways in which the social world operates (men lead and
women follow).
This broad, schematic theory of social and cultural reproduction is, how-
ever, open to various criticisms on grounds of functionalism, its somewhat
mechanical view of how ideologies work within texts, its neglect of the power
of the reader, and its inability to deal with contestation, multiple meanings and
ambiguities. Were this ideological system to work cleanly and comprehensively,
no new ideas and practices could emerge, and the social world would be a much
less kaleidoscopic and complex place. The role of media analysts, in particular,
would be reduced to reading texts and connecting them to prevailing social
perspectives and practices. This is an important task which has continued to
provide much of the impetus for a critical approach to the study of society and
culture, but it is only part of a much wider ‘project’ of understanding how
culture in multifarious forms is produced under rather different circumstances
with a diverse range of outcomes that include both reproduction and trans-
formation. It is important, then, to be aware that all texts have many potential
and conflicting meanings according to context and readership, and ‘decoding’
them may offer up subversive or surprising significatory possibilities. But
it would be naive indeed to argue that ‘meaning making’ is a vast, open game
in which every sign has the same chance as every other sign to be taken up
and used as definitive of ‘how it is’. Sports photographs are no different from
any other kind of text in that they are neither the innocent nor the ‘natural’
products of value-free sport and sports culture. As Duncan argues in her
analysis, using Foucault’s (1979) concept of the ‘panopticon’ (self-monitoring
and self-discipline imposed by feeling constantly under surveillance), of
women’s body images in the body and fitness magazine Shape:

Most poststructuralist media theorists . . . contend that texts carry multiple
meanings and that those meanings are constructed by both the texts and
the readers or viewers themselves. Although there are ‘preferred’ meanings